How To Control The Brightness Of Your Mac’s Screen With A Screen Shade

How’s the brightness on your Mac’s screen? No matter what I try, my Mac’s screen is never quite the correct level of brightness.

If I set the Mac to automatically adjust brightness, it does. But it’s never what my eyes tell me I want. If I adjust the bright manually, soon the ambient light changes, and I have to adjust it again; manually.

Is there an app for that?

Control Screen Brightness With Screen Shade

As it turns out, there are plenty of Mac apps that help adjust the screen’s brightness. Some are free, some are not.

All the screen brightness control apps I tried have one thing in common. The perfect brightness adjustment is temporary.

My latest find is Screen Shade, which is cheaper than cheap but not quite free.

What it does is simple. It places a shade over your Mac’s screen, presumably to reduce eye strain and save battery life.

This works well in a darkened room where the Mac screen’s bright light can tire your eyes and annoy anyone nearby (trying to sleep, for example).

Here’s a graphic example of how Screen Shade can dim the screen.

Can’t you do the same thing by putting the Displays preference pane in the Mac’s Menubar?

Nope. Your options are automatic or manually adjusting the brightness within the preferences, or use the keyboard shortcuts.

Or, you could try Brightness Slider which places a simple screen brightness slider in the Menubar. Slide it up and the screen gets brighter. Slide it down and the screen dims.

If your eyesight is bad then you might be taken advantage of by Brighter-Screen, yet another Mac app that makes it easy to dim or brighten the Mac’s screen. It’s a mere $4.99 more than Brightness Slider.

For less than a buck there’s Dimmer Than Dim which is also a Menubar slider than changes the screen’s brightness.

Similar but different is the Midnight app, priced between free, almost free, and you’re kidding, right? This one gives you a Menubar slider and an option to simply click and dim.

One of my favorites is also free. Shady For Mac resides in the Menubar, works on multiple screens, uses Apple’s built-in Core Animation to smooth your screen adjustments, and has the coolest icon.

What’s not to like about a Mac app with a cool icon?

If you find the automatic screen brightness adjustments don’t work for you, your choices for a solution range from free to almost free to not so free, but all require some effort from you.

5G? Meh!

About Alexis Kayhill

I'm a 25 year Mac user veteran, writer, photographer, wife, and mommy. I live in sunny San Diego with my husband, four children, two dogs, one mean old cat, and an SUV with a back seat full of beach sand. Read more of my articles here.